100 A REPOR TER A T LARGE AT about four-thirty on the after- .r-l... noon of FrIday, August 28, 1953, Thonlas E. Lewis, the thirty-five-year-old presIdent of Local 32-E of the Building Service Enlployees UnIon, returned fronl his office to the huilding at 50 East 1 91 st Street, in the BronJ\., where he, his wife, and their ten-) ear-old daughter occupied a five- roonl apartment on the fifth floor He rode up alone In the autonlatic elevator, and as he stepped out on his landing, a nlan nanled Edward (Snakes) Ryan fired five bullets into his body and killed hInl. Hearing the shots, a nlaid in Lewic;'s apdrtnlent first peered out of a window, and then, since nothing re- nlarkable seenled to be happening In the street, went to the door and opened it. \Vhen she saw the dead man, who was lying on his back in a pool of blood, she SCI ednled. The nlurderer, she reported later, was nowhere in sight. The nlur- der of Lewis, whose union had j urisdic- tion over the employees of the Yonkers Raceway, led to an investigation by a special conlnlission, in the course of which it was disclosed that politicians and gangsters had a con trolling interest in the raceway, and in the Roosevelt Raceway as well. Neither this investIga- tIon, nor the police investigation of the murder, has established why Lewis was assassinated, but it appears that Ryan was hired to do the job by labor rack- eteers whonl Lewis had antagonized R) an, a forty-seven-year-old hood- lunl of uninlpressive intelligence, had been in trouble with the police most of 1 1\ \ , ) , , '> ,., '.' ., '" x / t ^ ... .0, '" \.. *''' .. , , "". ..... - {..:::.... :." .>? ,.' . " "-II" , !tLY nil!!. , ... , J, ," ': \ \V. Sté1 1 :- LANGAN'S TEN MINUTE-S his life, and he hated thenl. He got into his first scrape in 1 923, at the age of seventeen, when he bIt the hand of a pohcenlan who was trYIng to break up a battle between two teen-age gangs on the upper West Side of Manhattan. The following year, he shot a polIcenlan in the arnl, and was conlmitted to the N apanoch State Institute for :vi ale Defective Delinquents. In 1 927, when he was out on parole, he got into a shoot- ing battle with another policenlan In a roonling house, received a severe head wound, and was sent to Sing Sing for robbery, grand larceny, and assault. In July, 1 928, he escaped, and three months later he was picked up by the polIce after another shooting battle. (He was suspected of having, in the in terinl, decapitated a policenlan nanled J erenlÎah Brosnan wIth a hail of bullets fronl a sawed-off shotgun, but this was never proved.) He was sentenced to thirty years, and he had twelve years still to serve fronl his earlier ternl, but, after a futile attempt to escape in 1930, he nlanaged to behave himself in jail, and in 195 0, having served half his total sentence, he received an automatic pa- role, under a now obsolete penal regu- lation. Apparently, Ryan had no fur- ther difficulties with the police until he shot Thonlas E. Lewis. AMONG the people who heard .n. Ryan's shots was Patrolman First Grade Vincent Langan, who was di- tr ' , "" r ..' \. (t '\0. ^ - ': ^ #' / \" . ., ,w;. '\ , '.. ,..; > .,'Ø .JtØ'.... ,..; recting traffic on Creston A venue be- tween East 190th and East 191st Streets, around the corner fronl the building in which the shooting occurred. Langan, who has been pronloted to the rank of second-grade detective for the way he handled the situation confront- ing hinl that day, IS a twenty-eight-year- old native of the Bronx, six feet three, dark-haired, deliberate in manner, and candid in expressing his thoughts as they conle to hinl. His father, who died when he was six, was of Irish descent and his mother is of Italian descent. An orphan, she was brought up in Manhattan by the Donlinican Sisters, and after her h us- band's death, she supported the boy and his younger sister for three years bv working as a cook in a home for the blind that the Sisters had started in the Bronx. Then she nlarried again. She hac; a chIld by her second husband, and Langan says gratefully that Ius step- father has always shown the same af- fection for hinl and his sister ac; for his own child. When Vincent Langan was a junior in Evander Childs High School, on Gun Hill Road, early in 1 944, he nlet his future wife, Rose Varcasia, who was also a pupil there. He was seventeen, and so was she. In May of that year, only a few nlonths after he had his first date with her, he left school and en- hsted in the Navy. He was sent to the Pacific theatre, on an LST, but he didn't see action. In July, 1946, he was honorably discharged as a signalnlan, third cldss Meanwhile, his nlother and stepfather had moved to Croton-on- Hudson, and he went to stay with thenl. He didn't care nluch for the ided of finishing high school, so he got a job on the assenlbly line of the Chevrolet plant at Tarrytown. Later, he switched to a better-paying job with the Ward Motor Vehicle Conlpany, in Mount Vernon, which builds truck bodIes On June 7, 1 94 7, he and Miss Varcasia were nlar- ried, and nloved into a three-roonl basenlent apartnlent at 2035 Nereid A venue, In the Bronx, where they still live. They no"r have two sons- George, six, and Frank, three. One evening in the sumnler of 1949, Langan nlet a young nlan who was tak- ing the patrolnlan's course at the Dele- hanty Institute, and, after a few talks with hinl, he decided to take up police work hinlself. "I'd been looking for a job that was a little more interesting than building truck bodies," he has said. "One that offered a little nlore security, too. Financial security, I nlean." He